Thursday, December 22, 2016

"St. Paul is the
only one to write about events chronologically. Even then, few facts
about Jesus are divulged. Paul’s Epistles rest on the “Heavenly Jesus,”
but never mention the living man. For such an important revolutionary
and religious figure, there are surprisingly no eyewitness counts."

An Orthodox Church in Belarus during Easter. Getty Images.

by Philip Perry

Christmas is a time of year where people are supposed to put aside
their differences and come together to celebrate in peace, love, and
understanding. Though few question the traditions of the season, many of
them predate Christianity in Europe. A lot was borrowed from the Norse
tradition of Yule—the celebration of the winter solstice. Others
originate with the Roman festival of Saturnalia. Ancient pagans brought pine branches into their houses, lit up the night with bonfires and candles, gave gifts, and burned the yule log.

Even Santa Claus comes from a variety of sources. Of course one of
them is St. Nicolaus of Turkey. But earlier renditions look far more
like the iconography associated with Odin or the Anglo-Saxon god, Woden.
Ancient proselytizers when converting the continent found it was much
easier if people could keep their traditions, and merely put a Christian
stamp on them. And that’s how these were incorporated into the season.
Some even question whether or not Jesus was born on December 25. The
Orthodox Church for example celebrates Christmas on January seventh, as
according to the Julian calendar which predates the Gregorian, a date they claim is more accurate.

Today more and more, historians and bloggers alike are questioning
whether the actual man called Jesus existed. Unfortunately, many of the
writings we do have are tainted, the authors being religious scholars or
atheists with an axe to grind. One important point is the lack of historical sources. In the bible, whole chunks of his life are missing. Jesus goes from age 12 to 30, without any word of what happened in-between.

Historians have measures in terms of a burden of proof. If an author
for instance is writing about a subject more than 100 years after it
occurred, it isn’t considered valid. Another important metric is the
validity of authorship. If the author cannot be clearly established, it
makes the record far less reliable.

What we do have are lots of sources completed several decades after the fact,
by authors of the gospels who wanted to promote the faith. The gospels
themselves are contradictory. For instance, they tell competing Easter
stories. Another problem, there aren’t any real names attached to many
of them, but rather an apostle’s who “signed off” on the manuscript.
There is also evidence that the gospels were heavily edited over the
years.

Some accounts of the Christmas story have no mention of the star or even the three wise men.

St. Paul is the only one to write about events chronologically. Even
then, few facts about Jesus are divulged. Paul’s Epistles rest on the
“Heavenly Jesus,” but never mention the living man. For such an
important revolutionary and religious figure, there are surprisingly no
eyewitness counts. And the writings we do have are biased. Roman
historians Josephus and Tacitus do make a few, scant remarks about his
life. But that was a century after Jesus’s time. So they may have
garnered their information from early Christians. And those threadbare
accounts are controversial too, since the manuscripts had been altered
over time by Christian scribes whose job it was to preserve them.

Today, several books approach the subject, including Zealot by Reza Aslan, Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All by David Fitzgerald, and How Jesus Became God by Bart Ehrman. Historian Richard Carrier in his 600 page monograph: On the Historicity of Jesus,
writes that the story may have derived from earlier semi-divine beings
from Near East myth, who were murdered by demons in the celestial realm.
This would develop over time into the gospels, he said. Another theory
is that Jesus was a historical figure who become mythicized later on.

Carrier believes the pieces added to the work of Josephus were done
by Christian scribes. In one particular passage, Carrier says that the
execution by Pilate of Jesus was obviously lifted from the Gospel of
Luke. Similar problems such as miscopying and misrepresentations are
found throughout Tacitus. So where do all the stories in the New
Testament derive? According to Carrier, Jesus may be as much a mythical
figure as Hercules or Oedipus.

Ehrman focuses on the lack of witnesses. “What sorts of things do
pagan authors from the time of Jesus have to say about him? Nothing. As
odd as it may seem, there is no mention of Jesus at all by any of his
pagan contemporaries. There are no birth records, no trial transcripts,
no death certificates; there are no expressions of interest, no heated
slanders, no passing references – nothing.”

According to universal archetypes, dying on a hill is a prerequisite for becoming a mythic hero.

The Rank-Raglan Mythotype is
a set of traits that heroes across cultures share. There are 22 of them
including a virgin birth, the audience knowing little to nothing about
his childhood, being the son of god, dying on a hilltop, and the
mysterious disappearance of his remains. Jesus meets 20 of the traits
total. In fact, no one else meets the hero archetype quite as well.

One biblical scholar holds an even more radical idea, that Jesus
story was an early form of psychological warfare to help quell a violent
insurgency. The Great Revolt against Rome occurred in 66 BCE. Fierce
Jewish warriors known as the Zealots won
two decisive victories early on. But Rome returned with 60,000 heavily
armed troops. What resulted was a bloody war of attrition that raged for
three decades.

Atwill contends that the Zealots were awaiting the arrival of a warrior messiah
to throw off the interlopers. Knowing this, the Roman court under Titus
Flavius decided to create their own, competing messiah who promoted
pacifism among the populous. According to Atwill, the story of Jesus was
taken from many sources, including the campaigns of a previous Caesar. Of course, there may very well have been a Rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef (as
would have been Jesus’s real name) who gathered a flock around his
teachings in the first century. Most antiquarians believe a real man
existed and became mythicized. But the historical record itself is thin.

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About Me

About Me:Born in West Virginia, USA, I've lived and traveled in many
different places all over the planet, and
experienced many cultures.
As a boy, I grew up within the Protestant Christian matrix, embraced the
Bahá'í Faith when I was 19, and spent the rest of my life learning about other religions
and belief systems. My life experience has led me to what I would call unity consciousness - where I view myself, fellow humans and all other beings as part of the same Universal Tree.

Like an eagle, if we fly above all the diverse differences that we have, we see the truer reality of oneness. Our
differences are in fact our strengths, adding to the richness and
overall collective knowledge and
wisdom of our diverse and rich human species.

Human civilization is on the verge of an explosive growth in enlightened
consciousness - a flowering
of the arts and sciences, an end to fear, hatred, scarcity, poverty,
disease, manipulation,
obfuscation, injustice, and warfare - like the flowering of a Lotus!